Israeli doctors have said they will not begin force-feeding Palestinian detainees who have launched a hunger strike demonstration, an announcement that puts medical professionals on a collision course with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government.

No less than 65 of the 290 striking prisoners have been
hospitalized as a result of the hunger strike, a plight inspired
by their months and years in detention in Israel without being
charged with any crimes. Daily rallies have been held in support
of the prisoners by the Palestinian community.

As a result of the growing hunger strike, Prime Minister
Netanyahu has reportedly asked the government to speed up a bill
giving them permission to force-feed the dozens of hospitalized
inmates. The measure would give a judge permission to enact
force-feeding if he or she considers the inmate is putting his
own life at risk.

Yoel Hadar, a legal adviser to the Netanyahu administration, told
the Associated Press the bill would also force a
judge to consider if a striking inmate is deemed to be putting
the interests of the state at risk (the death of a hunger-striker
would almost certainly add to the unrest in the Palestinian
Territories and contribute to criticism about Israel's policy on
this matter).

“We want the judge to take into consideration what will
happen to the country if something happens,” he said.
“People go on a hunger strike for political reasons...and the
consequence could be political damage to the state. The state
also has the right to stop the strike.”

Netanyahu has said he is confident the force-feeding will
eventually be carried out, citing the US policy of force-feeding
hunger-strikers at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The
Guantanamo policy has drawn criticism from the United Nations
human rights office, which said it constitutes torture and is
thus a violation of international law.

Family members of the inmates told the AP they support their
relatives, if only because the detainees face no other
alternative. Lamees Faraj said Wednesday that her husband Abdel
Razeg, once a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization,
has been locked up in administrative detention for almost eight
of the past 20 years.

“My husband is in Israeli jails without knowing why and when
this nightmare is going to end,” she said.

Family members who are opposed to the force-feeding, a brutal
process in which a person is fed via a tube forced into their
nose, now have support from a growing number of medical groups
and organizations.

The Israel Medical Association has asked its doctors not to
follow any orders from government officials that ask them to
force feed an inmate. The World Medical Association, the group
many national associations fall under, said “force feeding is
never ethically acceptable” as recently as 2006.

“It goes against the DNA of the doctors to force treatment on
a patient,” Israel Medical Association spokesman Ziva Miral
said. “Force-feeding is torture, and we can't have doctors
participating in torture.”

There are currently an estimated 900 Palestinians currently
imprisoned in Israel, which claims it has not choice but to lock
up perceived enemies in order to prevent attacks on the military.
One tactic the government has traditionally used is
administrative segregation, intermittently imprisoning detainees
for long periods under the guise of security.

“It is outrageous that Israel has locked these men up for
months without either charging them with crimes or allowing them
to see the evidence it says it has against them,” Sarah Lee
Whitson, the Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said in
a letter to US Congress.

“The detainees evidently feel they have to put their lives in
jeopardy through hunger strikes so that Israel will end these
unlawful practices. Israel's regular use of administrative
detention, at the least, inverts international law and turns the
exception into the norm, at the cost of the fundamental right to
due process.”